DIY Filmmaker Digest 10 -- Week of January 31, 2026

Welcome to this week’s DIY Filmmaker Digest — part syllabus, part mixtape, part fever dream of cinema’s shifting ground. Below: essays and interviews that ask what artists are tinkering with, what systems are breaking, and how you might improvise your own way forward. There’s a major New Mexico bias, plus podcasts, videos, and trailers to keep your queue weird. DIY forever!

But first, a little congratulations: The Worst Movie Ever is funded! This project is a weird one -- we're not just crowdfunding but also crowdsourcing. Each and every backer gets to contribute something that the filmmakers must include in the film! So for example, you can buy a frame of the movie for $1 -- make the frame whatever you want (within reason). Buy 24 and get a whole second of the movie! Or (my personal favorite) make the filmmakers shoot one of the scenes in the language of your choice for the low, low pledge of $1000! Anyone speak Klingon?

The Worst Movie Ever is the pilot project for The Pool, Dust Wave's very own open-source crowdfunding platform -- more on that later I promise. And we're not even raising money for the production costs -- we're making this old-school for $0 and 0 cents (as much as that's possible) and giving the money to one of our dearest friends and partners, FUSION! So if you hate us, cool -- make our lives miserable by buying 20 fart sound effects. And if you love us, do the same. If we crack $5K, the filmmakers (anonymous as of now) have promised to get a Worst Movie Ever tattoo! So please make them do something very permanent and stupid!

Follow The Worst Movie Ever on Instagram to keep up with the project.

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Also, we have friends making films that still need your support, including:

Becca Elbrecht's Whodonut

Niamh Khan's Tether

And without further ado:

Articles

The 2025 Music Video Wrap Report

“Musicians and writers and painters have not somehow become less interesting in the course of a single generation. Instead, the ground has shifted. Rents are too high; wages are too meager; wealth is too concentrated. Artists are forced to focus on their survival rather than their work, leaving little time or space to cultivate their skills.”

The Testament of Ann Lee Is the Wild Shaker Musical You Crave

“Whenever these people deal with a biographical character whose extraordinary accomplishments were directly motivated by signs and messages from God, these directors wimp out in the most contemptible fashion.”

What Film Festivals Taught Me About Building a Career

“Festivals aren’t interchangeable. They’re nodes in an industry network.”

La Chimera Director Alice Rohrwacher's Next Project Is a Silent Film

“And where we're faced with a limited resource, we develop creativity and imagination more.”

The Moral Case for “Selling Out”

“Unfortunately, most aspiring professional screenwriters don’t even try to do this. And it’s not because they’re lazy or untalented. It’s because they’ve been told - explicitly and implicitly - that real artists don’t write with the audience in mind, and that caring about a large audience is effectively a confession of bad taste.”

I Want You to Make the Movies You Want

“NonDē cinema is non-dependent on the current Hollywood ecosystem, and instead asserts the creative, financial, distribution and all forms of cultural control as the intentional responsibility of the individual team.”

How the Film Industry's New Shape Is an Amazing Opportunity for Filmmakers

“The advantage of money has shifted away from creating the image and towards access.”

How to Turn a Film Festival Connection into a Creative Partnership

“If the producers didn't know us really, really well, it would've been much more challenging.”

The Future Belongs to the Creative Generalists

“The future of creative work isn’t about trying to outrun AI, it’s rooted in the craft fundamentals, interpersonal connection, and love of learning that captivated us in the first place.”

Jay Duplass Breaks Down the New Rules for Making Indie Movies in 2026

“It’s funny because people are talking about A.I. and how shocking it all is, and I’m just like, they’re the big blockbuster studio movies that are made by formula. They are already A.I., in my mind.”

No Other Choice Is Another Masterpiece by Park Chan-Wook

“This film is going for a visceral representation of life under capitalism, without resorting to mere polemics.”

George R.R. Martin Isn't Finished

“I would give notes, and nothing would happen. Sometimes he would explain why he wasn’t doing it. Other times, he would tell me, ‘Oh, OK, yeah, I’ll think about that.’ It got worse and worse, and I began to get more and more annoyed.”

How This Filmmaker Built a Sundance Short with DIY Animation

“Outside of the 1%, it seems like the people who are really doing well under Trump 2.0 are the scammers, grifters, and huckster entrepreneurs.”

Filmmakers, Programmers and Critics Pick This Year’s Most Remarkable Short Films

“Watching this, I kept thinking about how human intelligence is being drained to power artificial intelligence, while the people behind the screens stay disconnected from the benefits of the technology they sustain.”

Independent Film's New Reality: 10 Inflection Points for 2026

“Power has shifted away from the moment of acquisition and toward the architecture underneath it.”

The Big Art/Little Debt Plan: Balancing Risk and Responsibility While Making Great Films

“And frankly, there’s no way for us purely independent filmmakers to know what to financially count on from our movies right now.”

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple Is Weird, Wild, and Fun

“There had been sporadic investigations and loud rumors and even a few outright accusations that indicate the strong possibility that highly placed people and major institutions must’ve been covering for Sir Jimmy.”

The New Artist Economy Part V: Financing and the Road Ahead

“What we have instead is capital optimized to avoid embarrassment rather than enable greatness.”

AI Companies Will Fail. We Can Salvage Something from the Wreckage

“Tech bosses want us to believe that there is only one way a technology can be used.”

The Art of Receiving Feedback

“It’s so easy to get stuck in your own head when you receive troves of feedback.”

Curator Picks: Sundance 2026

“Our favorite short films from Sundance 2026”

The Indie 50: 1% for the Rest of Us

“Right now, most of the benefit flows to the big guys. By carving out just 1%, we'd have an outsized impact on the local independent film scene.”

The Best Film Festivals for Short Films

“Many high profile Festivals are sifting through 1,000s of submissions and accepting <1.0% of them.”

I Don't Want to Be a Film Director: Béla Tarr's Art of Refusal

“It is not here to help filmmakers; it helps only producers and bankers.”

Luis Buñuel: Desire and Deviance

“Guillaume Apollinaire may have coined the term surréalisme in 1917, but most pin the birth of the movement to the publication of André Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism” in 1924.”

Podcasts & Videos

1x

Search Engine - The Fediverse Experiment

“The moguls set the rules and we had to put up with them.”

1x

Eye of the Duck - The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

“It's an era of Hollywood that I think is about to vanish before our eyes.”

Josh Safdie & Sean Baker - The A24 Podcast

“I hate the concept of video village.”

From the Chicken's POV: Ian Samuels on Bringing Chicken to Life

“The idea is to be in her point of view as much as possible.”

1x

The Lack - Heretic

“Is it a way of nurturing and developing our capacity to love one another, or is it a way of controlling and limiting human beings?”

1x

Screen Talk - Our 15 Most Anticipated Films of 2026, Critics Choice and SAG Awards, & Special Guests from Row K Entertainment

“The mid-level independent movie is going to have to be really cared for.”

The 25 Best Films of 2025: A Video Countdown

Budget Filmmaking Gear I Use on Real Sets

“Good filmmaking isn't about buying the most expensive version.”

Trailers

And that's this week's digest. Shout out to all of Dust Wave's amazing filmmakers -- we have a special group of creative folks that make movies no matter what. Beauty and joy is our pursuit.

A major congratulations to Jeanette Aguilar Harris and her amazing cast and crew on her recently-completed shoot for Dancing Through the Darkness. I've already seen some of the footage and I can't wait for the world to see it! Well done folks!

As always, everything we share is chosen with the same compass: collectivity over ego, experiments over formulas, access over gatekeeping.

Keep making what only you can make, keep passing the torch sideways, keep stitching together the world we actually want to live in.

Alonso Indacochea

Dust Wave co-founder